THE FREENESS OF THE SPIRIT


The Himalayas - a strange place to put a nunnery. This is the idea directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger keep coming back to in “Black Narcissus” (1947). There, an atmosphere of altitude, wind, isolation, and erotic paintings pressed on the architectural heritage of the site are the very source of distress for this group of religious leaders in what could naively be considered a place for meditation and evangelization. Yet, not all of it is cage, and there is room for spiritual ascension. 

While praying in the chapel and noticing an open window with a blue sky and tree branches, Sister Clodagh reminisces her time with a former fiancée. This is suggested editorially (duties handled by Reginald Mills) by showing her closing her eyes and the frame slowly dissolving to a wide shot establishing the couple on a sunny day. Up until this point, the flashback has only been shaped as Clodagh evoking a memory. However, the transition back to the chapel creates a distinct association between the realms: it sees the frame dissolve from a close-up of Sister Clodagh in the past to a close-up of her in the present. 

The transition has several qualities. Firstly, the dissolve lingers for about seven seconds, an overlay giving a sort of translucent appearance to the veil (an image of restraint) and later to her hair (an image of looseness). Secondly, Sister Clodagh’s head movement, motivated by her gaze at her beloved, approaches the position she is framed in by the camera, back in the chapel. Avoiding the route of a hard jump cut, this match creates a simulacrum of spatial and temporal continuity, one that is broken by physical logic. The continuum it portrays, reinforced by the line “I want to stay here like this for the rest of my life”, is of her mental world. The out-of-body experience is materialistically achieved and represented on the screen as her consciousness travels from one setting to another, like a spirit flying and landing. Is this a predecessor of more refined face-morphs and astral projections from modern cinema?

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